We Germans have quite an expertise in building walls. Today our parliament enacted a law to establish mandatory infrastructure to filter the internet. The law is targeted at child pornography, but industry and politicians already announced intentions to use the infrastructure to regulate access to online gambling, filesharing and more. Even if the law currently excludes these scenarios, it is doubtful if use in civil lawsuits can be excluded at all, not to mention that Germany has a history of expanding these kind of laws, like e.g. with traffic monitoring data collected for highway tolls.

Once again, our future and our digital rights are in the hands of a supreme court. A worrying development that this happens so often in so many countries, lately. What happens if this last bastion of civil rights fails this time, or the next time?

If it happens this time, Germany will join the ranks of countries controlling internet access this summer or autumn. This development marks a whole generation being alienated by the polictial establishment. It marks the utter disrespect for a petition against this law that gathered 135.000 supporters in just a few weeks. It marks a debate that discrimnated citizens that care about and understand the internet, as supporters of child porn or belittled them as “community”. Therefore I’m sad, disappointed and angry.

So, what’s next?

There’s no escape, this is a global development. Protests are being organized for next Saturday. But in the end I fear this is going to be our 10 foot high wall and we need to get used to bringing 11 foot ladders everywhere we want to go.

If you need to catch up with the developments in Germany, netzpolitik.org has a good summary.

Sometimes, following and commenting depressing news, I feel like I’m engaging in too much tinfoil-hattery. Then again, reality kicks back in.

From the start of the intitiative, critics of the german internet filtering were concerned that this opens Pandora’s Box of getting rid of unwanted content on the internet. Commercial gambling, file sharing, critics. It’s a slippery slope.

And already, days after a press conference where we were told this was only a measure against child porn, politicians and lobbyist come forward to demand exactly those measures:

• Heinrich Sievers, a hessian politician calls for filtering of gambling sites not run by the state, claiming otherwise the internet would be a “lawless area”.
• Christian Sprang, a book industry official, calls for blocking of sites distributing books and violating copyrights.
• Jürgen Büssow, head of the local government for Dortmund, already annonced the intent to push for blocking foreign gambling in the wake of the discussion about the law.
• Roswitha Müller-Piepenkötter, said that calling these measures “internet censorship” is “fiddle-faddle”. And went on to proclaim that there is no freedom of speech when it comes to “child porn… and copyright infingement”.
• As already mentioned on this blog, Dieter Gorny, head of the association of the German music-industry, calls for blocking to “protect copyrights”.
• Hours after telling us not to worry, the justice minister Brigitte Zypries gives an interview where she warns about increasing demands and pressure to block all kinds of content deemed questionable.

So, there. Once the infrastructure is up, blocking all kinds of stuff will be next. The pressure is already building up rapidly.

In another, even more depressing news, according to a speaker of the ministry of justice, there are now, despite contrary assertions to the public earlier, already definitive plans to use access logs of the filtering to prosecute. The mere act of clicking a link will be enough to consititut initial suspicion. So as soon as this is law, clicking a (shortened) link, or your browser prefetching content while you surf, can lead to you be surveilled and even your home raided by the police.

From where I’m standing things look pretty bleak. Not to say: we might be royally fucked sooner than we think.

So what to do? I think there’s still time to get more involved into these processes. To watch closely and to try to participate. I’m not having a lot of hope or illusions about the outcome, but I feel that we all as human beings have a moral obligation to leave this world in a better state than we found it. And I want to be able to say that I tried that.

Yesterday after a press conference on the topic the a bill to police internet access was brought on its way to become law in a cabinet meeting. This is of course all discussed as measures against child porn, ignoring the infrastructure that gets established in the process and the concupiscences it will and already does generate. (Also in the news yesterday: Dieter Gorny, head of the association of the German music-industry, welcomes the bill and encourages the government to also use it to “protect copyrights”.)

Last Friday, voluntary contracts with five of the seven biggest providers were signed that addressed filtering DNS requests explicitly. The bill on the other hand is technology-neutral and talks about effective measures of filtering.

The plan is to show a stop sign once a user tries to access one of the sites that is on the secret list of the federal police. Until “privacy concerns are cleared up” the stop site will only count the visitors to collect a (preferably high) number to have an indicator of the success of this measure. Already however there is talk about storing logs and using them for prosecution “in real-time”. Clicking links might be enough to bring you in the focus of the authorities in the future. Not to speak of e.g. link-prefetching, Javascripts or Malware that generate DNS requests.

Another interesting detail of the bill is that it currently only targets ISPs with more than ten thousand users. Universities and government agencies are also excluded. This is a (futile) try to prevent leakage of the censor list by minimizing the number of people with access to it. Once we’ve got actually “effective measures” to filter leaked filter lists, I assume this will be changed to include every ISP.

Watching the press conference it became once more painfully obvious that these are people whose only contact with the internet is by way of a laser printer. Also, from where I’m standing, belittling concern about civil rights and freedom seems to become more and more universal. I think it’s going to get a lot worse, before it gets better again.

Herdict.org is centralizing in real time, reports relative to inaccessible websites in order for users to compare datas and determine hypothetical problems. By crowdsourcing data from around the world, they can document accessibility for any web site, anywhere.

Considering the recent Internet filtering threats, it’s time for everyone to feel concerned and keep an eye on every little details.

The website that rhymes with Tikimeaks published a draft of the german law to implement internet filtering:

• The law talks about “effective meassures” that should be used for filtering. So even if it’s just DNS now, we already have the option to use something that actually works.
• Censor lists are highly confidential. Publishing them is threatened by legal punishment.
• The explanatory text talks about DNS filters and calls them “grundrechtsschonend” (“gentle to fundamental rights and the constitution”).

Excuse me, I have to vomit.